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| Peter C. Newman - Saturday Night - 1987 |
Peter Charles Newman CC CD (May 10, 1929 – September 7, 2023)
Author Peter C. Newman died today. He was 94.
Bibliography - Wikipedia
1959 Flame of Power: Intimate Profiles of Canada's Greatest Businessmen
1963 Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years
1968 The Distemper of Our Times: Canadian Politics in Transition
1969 A Nation Divided: Canada and the Coming of Pierre Trudeau
1972 Their Turn to Curtsy: Your Turn to Bow
1973 Home Country: People, Places, and Power Politics
1975 The Canadian Establishment: Volume One: The Old Order
1978 Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (published in America in 1979 under the different title, King of the Castle: The Making of a Dynasty)
1981 The Canadian Establishment: Volume Two: The Acquisitors
1982 The Establishment Man: Conrad Black, A Portrait of Power
1983 True North, Not Strong and Free: Defending the Peaceable Kingdom in the Nuclear Age
1983 Debrett's Illustrated Guide to the Canadian Establishment (editor)
1984 Drawn and Quartered: The Trudeau Years
1985 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume One: Company of Adventurers
1987 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Two: Caesars of the Wilderness
1989 Empire of the Bay: An Illustrated History of the Hudson Bay Company
1991 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Three: Merchant Princes
1989 Canada: The Great Lone Land
1991 Canada 1892: Portrait of a Promised Land
1993 Promise of the Pipeline
1995 Nortel, Northern Telecom: Past, Present, Future
1995 The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance
1996 Defining Moments: Dispatches from an Unfinished Revolution
1996 Vancouver: The Art of Living Well
1998 The Canadian Establishment: Volume Three: The Titans
1998 Sometimes a Great Nation: Will Canada Belong to the 21st Century?
1998 Canada: The Land that Shapes Us
2002 Continental Reach
2004 Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power (Autobiography)
2005 The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister
2008 Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada's Media Mogul
2010 Heroes: Canadian Champions, Dark Horses, and Icons
2010 Mavericks: Canadian Rebels, Renegades, and Anti-Heroes
2011 When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada (originally titled: Michael Ignatieff: The Man In Full)
2016 "Hostages to Fortune: The United Empire Loyalists and The Making of Canada"
Since we seem to have a little knowledge of Canada’s past and immediate past, few might be aware who this Viennese-born man was and how important his contributions have been.
I will diverge a tad to explain that what Newman did would have been appreciated in the Latin American countries and especially in Mexico. In Mexico his name would have been followed by two words – autor y cronista.
In a past in the 19th century we had historians. Now a historian is a person who studies a remote but not immediate past. Thus in Mexico a cronista is an author who records and opines on events as they unfold. They become for me a living archive. If you place in Google Cronistas Mexicanos you will get a long list of them.
I am hard-pressed to name any Vancouver ‘cronista’.
Few if any will know that Prime Minister Lester Pearson assigned Patrick Reid to find someone to design the Maple Leaf Flag and that it became just that in 1964. Until Reid died in 2015 I would cross the street in Kerrisdale’s 41st Avenue to greet the man. Anybody in my native Argentina would tell you our flag was designed by Manuel Belgrano.
Patrick Reid& the Maple Leaf Flag
My wife Rosemary and our two daughters arrived in Vancouver in 1975. I went to a now gone bookstore on Granville and asked for a book about Canada. Pierre Berton’s Vimy was placed in my hands. It was the first book about Canada that I read. In it I found out that Berton stated that Canada became a country at that bloody WWI battle. I have not forgotten the book. I treasure it.
Of late there a rumours that our Vancouver Hudson’s Bay Company store on West Georgia is moribund. In some way Hudson's Bay, just like the de Havilland Beaver helped bring British Columbia’s interior into the fold, did the same for Canada .
P.D. James & the de Havilland Beaver
Peter C. Newman’s three books on the Hudson's Bay Company:
1985 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume One: Company of Adventurers
1987 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Two: Caesars of the Wilderness
1991 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Three: Merchant Princes
And a few more chronicled how our vast wilderness became Canada.
I have written a few blogs about Peter C. Newman and I can even boast that my name along his on a book cover Vancouver – The Art of Living Well that was published in 1996.
Through the years I managed to photograph this man three times. My favourite was the first time in 1987 as he was my ticket to shooting for the then fabulous Saturday Night. I got the job for the 100th Anniversary of the magazine because Annie Leibovitz turned down the job.
What is really important about this man is that he was a genuine chronicler of what made our country be what it was.
The only other man who always wore a Greek hat was artist Toni Onley.
A correction:
I loved your blog on Peter C. Newman. But I have a request for a slight edit at the end. We both knew another Peter who always wore a Greek Fisherman’s hat, even when he was in the hospital bed. Peter Trower. I think he deserves to me included as part of an illustrious trio. Interestingly, few of the Newman obits mention that he was a renowned Stan Kenton scholar. He often claimed that listening to Kenton taught him how to write. I think that’s pretty cool. Thanks for caring. John Lekich
